The Last Dawn
A Mystery
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
It is time to die…
1989. It’s been three years since Captain Ajax Montoya cleared the smoke and blood from his last case—and what a three years. The old world order is coming down along with the Berlin Wall, and the Soviet “Evil Empire” is being born to the ash heap of history by its once captive people.
But in a psychiatric hospital in Managua, a near catatonic Ajax missed all that. In 1986, Ajax freed his only remaining friend from a psychotic killer. But his ‘methods’ were such that he was imprisoned in a nut-house for his pains. And for three years his world stood still.
But ghosts don’t know time nor read headlines. So when one of the many phantoms from Ajax’s bloody past shows up, he is rescued from his personal nightmare only to be plunged from one hell into another.
El Salvador in 1989 is in a civil war so vicious, they say even the Grim Reaper needs an escort. But when the parents of Ajax’s old love beg him to go there and save their son—as he did not save their daughter—Ajax is on the next plane.
And he’s not alone. Gladys Darío—the lieutenant whose rescue cost Ajax his freedom and his mind—has been stewing in Miami for three years, and she is ready to back his play, even if it costs her own life.
Now all they have to do is parachute into the hottest war in the Americas and find that one needle of a missing person in a haystack of the disappeared.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A compelling story line and complex characters distinguish Gannon's second novel featuring former Sandinista leader Ajax Montoya (after 2014's Night of the Jaguar). In 1989, Margret Mary and James "Big Jim" Peck want to hire Ajax and his partner, Gladys Dar o, to track down their 24-year-old son, Jimmy, who traveled to El Salvador for a U.S. senator to gather information on the country's human rights record. For that to happen, Gladys needs to get Ajax discharged from a psychiatric hospital, where he's been treated for aggression with medications that have left him catatonic. Fortunately for the Pecks, Ajax has just been shamming his diminished capacity, and he's able to undertake the covert operation to try to save Jimmy. The plot integrates the violence of the region without contrivance, and Ajax, who's haunted by the blood he's shed in the past, is a well-developed lead. Some attempts at humor, however, won't be to every taste.
